“... thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For decades, the ribs of a French brig stood on the sand – evidence, it was said, of a Napoleonic invasion that never happened. Stevenson had a copy of a book by Dr Horace Benge Dobell, On Loss of Weight, Blood-Spitting and Lung Disease. Dobell had been a consulting physician at the Royal Hospital for Diseases ...”

“... difficulties for his actors by reducing the available means of expression: burying a character in sand first up to her waist, then up to her neck, for instance. And he moves constantly between French and English, the choice seemingly depending on which language is currently going dead on him, or isn’t going dead in the right way. In English he feels ‘a ...”

“... bought to protect its troops in Afghanistan from roadside bombs, painted the colour of desert sand and crowded around the maintenance sheds of a military base. There was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks. A column of Warriors clanked up the hill. The Warrior is a strong fighting vehicle. It can protect a team of soldiers as it ...”

“... Local Energy has applied for permission to bore into the crust, to pump water, chemicals and sand into shale rocks, and to release the gas. ‘We want to light a fire under the debate and we want to make money as well,’ the pro-fracking pundit Nick Grealy said. The fracturing will start at Harrow and follow a track across town, in the footsteps of Tory ...”

“... the tents and the sea related by a tinny blue, and the clouds created out of the colours of the sand and the women’s dresses. In these works, Sickert was deploying Whistler’s preferred alla prima, or ‘wet on wet’, technique, which Whistler also used for large-scale canvases. The paint wasn’t given the chance to dry between stages, but added ...”

“... laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can. Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. Nothing ...”

“... mass of aquamarine tesserae separated by thin white threads, mimicking the effect of Caribbean sand. The water was so clean, so pure, that it wasn’t like water at all. It reminded me of the elixir in which they keep tropical fish in Charterhouse Aquatics, beneath the arches of the London Overground railway in Haggerston. These tiny creatures, a ...”

“... affairs, his politics, his past, his present, even his dress (he used to pad about the college in sand-shoes). Carr was the obvious candidate for the Chair, when it fell vacant, but a palace coup did him out of it: Agnes Headlam-Morley was appointed, perhaps because her father had been official historian of Versailles, perhaps on the strength of her skill in ...”

“... yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones ...”

“... British Army. Since 1922 three hundred members of the RUC have been killed by the IRA. Constable George Chambers was shot on 15 December 1972 as he cleared the Kilwilkie estate in Lurgan because of a suspected car bomb. Constable Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market ...”

“... by a vermicular motion, and keeping hold of his legs, I contrived to scramble through a burrow of sand and sharp bits of pottery, frequently scraping my back against the roof.When he arrived at the burial place, ‘I do not think in all my travel I ever felt the same strong sensation of being in an enchanted place, so much as when led by this sinewy child of ...”

“... bombs went off all over the country in a spree that saw 120 dead. It was two years exactly since George W. Bush had announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq were over, an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... a very small proportion of Jews’, since there was little untilled soil except for stony hills or sand dunes. The Arabs, he added, were not ‘wild men of the desert’, and he warned that ‘if in the course of time the Jewish holding in the country develops to such an extent as to encroach in some degree on the native population, the latter will not easily ...”

“... of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story from ...”